Caroline Fleck on Why Validation Fuels Our Sense of Mattering | EP 659

Coming up next on Passion Struck.

One of the weirdly, this is going to sound so weird to say, but it is true.

One of the weirdly refreshing things about having cancer was that people immediately understood, right?

I'd lost my hair and all this stuff.

So I couldn't, I'd have to cancel a session or I'd have to, everybody understood.

There was all sorts of support and understanding.

And I'm thinking like, wow.

This feels, because with that mess and depression, that stuff is very hard to see in a lot of ways.

Welcome to Passion Struck.

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Now, let's go out there and become passionstruck.

Welcome, friends, to Passion Struck episode 659.

I want to start by thanking you for being here.

Over a third of you return week after week, and that loyalty fuels this growing movement.

If you haven't yet left a rating or review, I'd be so grateful if you just took 30 seconds to do so.

It's the single best way for others to discover and to join our community.

Last week, we wrapped up our Reclaiming Wellness series with my solo episode on the fragmentation gap, the hidden divide between the selves we present and the wholeness we crave.

And now we've stepped into our brand new series, Decoding Humanity.

We opened this series with Dr.

Bruce Miller and Dr.

Virginia Sturm, who revealed how the social brain shapes empathy, awe, and even our longevity.

Over the next several weeks, I'm going to explore the foundation of what it means to be human, our biology, psychology, trauma, identity, community, and the stories that shape us.

Because only when we understand those foundations can we begin to live not just optimized lives, but whole ones.

That's why I want to bring you today's conversation with Dr.

Caroline Fleck.

Caroline is a licensed clinical psychologist, researcher, founder of the Luma Mental Health Initiative, and author of the powerful new book, Validation.

What fascinates me about Caroline's work and why it's so important for this series is the way she flips the script on anxiety.

Instead of treating it as an enemy to eradicate, she helps us see it as information, a signal pointing us back towards our deeper needs and values.

For so many of us, the challenge isn't that we feel too much, it's that we don't know how to listen to what those feelings are telling us.

In today's episode, we're going to explore why anxiety is often a signal rather than a flaw to be fixed.

We'll go into the hidden role perfectionism plays in chronic stress, how mindfulness and values-based living rewire the brain for resilience, and how small intentional actions can transform not just your mental well-being, but your entire life trajectory.

Before we dive in, a quick reminder, our new store, StartMattering.com, is now live.

It's part of the Mattering Revolution, a movement built on one truth.

You matter, live like it.

Every hoodie, tee, and hat carries that message, reminding you daily of your worth and sparkling ripples of change far beyond yourself.

Head over to startmattering.com today and we're the movement.

Now, let's dive into this transformative discussion with Dr.

Caroline Fleck.

Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.

Now, let that journey begin.

I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Caroline Fleck on Passionstruck.

Welcome, Caroline.

How are you today?

I am am doing well.

Thank you, John.

How are you?

I am doing fantastic.

I am so excited to have you on this.

And we're going to be talking about your fantastic book in a little bit, Validation, how the skill set that revolutionized psychology will transform your relationships, increase your influence, and change your life.

So thank you so much for writing that book.

How does it feel to have it out in the world?

Feels amazing and surreal, right?

Because you spend all this time writing in solitude.

And then it's this very public affair.

And so it's a little bit of a juxtaposition there that takes you a second to settle into.

I'd love to start these interviews out rather than going into the book, letting the audience get to know you better.

You're a psychologist.

You're an author, as I just said.

You're also a cancer survivor.

Yes.

But if we met you, we being the audience at a dinner party and didn't know any of that, what would be the most surprising thing we would learn about you?

I don't know if it would be the most surprising.

It would be up there.

John, I was a competitive baton twirler for about 10 years and it was like super competitive, like eight hours a day in the gym.

This was my childhood, basically.

I grew up just training all the time in this really weird sport.

It's not what I tend to open with, but it's a big part of who I am in a lot of different ways.

Well, that takes a lot of coordination.

To To me, it's almost like juggling.

It takes a ton of coordination.

And I wasn't good at it when I was not like a natural.

And yes, some people are naturally good at baton twirling.

I was not.

So I had to work really hard to be competitive.

Yeah.

Caroline, you have lived through things that most people would find overwhelming.

Severe depression.

cancer, which you recently beat, multiple sclerosis,

and yet you're here smiling, laughing.

You're out there on the road teaching others.

But before we get more into the science of validation, I'd love to know, when you look at the arc of your life so far, what do you see?

Oh my gosh.

I'll be totally honest because I don't respect anything but honesty at this point in my life.

I see a lot of suffering.

I see a lot of loneliness.

And then I see a lot of intention.

I see a lot of purpose.

I see a lot of discipline.

And I see a lot of love.

And I actually see now that so many of those positive qualities grew out of that suffering, if that makes sense, or more specifically, I think what I did with it.

I think suffering can destroy you, but it can also, in some ways, empower you.

Let's talk about suffering there for a second, because if we could go back in time and meet meet you in one of your toughest moments, where would we find you?

And what would you want the listeners to understand about that version of you?

Boy, that's a great question.

And it really hits because I felt for so long that I've had two personalities.

There was this outward-facing,

extroverted, I think people, when they hear about like depression or some of these conditions, they think really shut down

and be like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.

And honestly, I learned to project something very different, which was very animated, very engaged.

I like to joke around.

But if you were to see behind the curtain, what you would see is somebody who couldn't sleep, often couldn't eat, could really only study or read to avoid the suffering that I was feeling.

And so you would see someone who was constantly running from themselves and trying to hide the fact that that was their experience.

And that had to be painful.

And to be honest, I've been there and know how painful it can be.

Earlier today, I released a solo episode and I introduced a new concept that I've never heard of.

I call it the absorption gap.

And we hear all the time these things, like you need more inputs in your life, do the cold plunge, do the sauna, or eat athletic greens, AG1, go to the gym, do mindfulness, do this, do that.

And there was a period in my life where I was doing it all.

I was working out eight to 10 hours a week.

I was doing the mindfulness stuff.

Same.

But none of it was getting through.

And I found myself lethargic all the time.

I was actually gaining weight.

My labs were actually getting worse.

And as a person who hosts a health podcast, I was like embarrassed because I was trying to do all these things that everyone was telling me to do.

Looking back, what I came to the conclusion, I was throwing so many inputs at my body that my body couldn't absorb them and so they weren't getting through do you think there is such a thing as the absorption gap

i'm just pausing for a second because it does really resonate and i so i'm a behaviorist by training which means i focus on how we use learning theory and behavioral principles to change behavior And what I hear you describing in that absorption gap is almost like a body and a mind that's just being inundated with change.

You got to change this, you got to change that, you got to change this.

And there is this point at which the body just, it can't, right?

Like it can't keep responding to all of those inputs.

And in the absence of any acceptance,

it starts to reject

those inputs.

I think you're absolutely right.

And I say that from personal experience as well.

I think acceptance for somebody like myself, a trained baton twirler who is constantly working, competing, learning how to put that change emphasis down and just be,

I needed the just being in order for any of that change to actually like seep in, I guess is how I think about it.

The way I was thinking about it is...

I came up with that we have really four different types of filters.

We have biological filters, neurological filters, emotional filters, and cognitive filters.

And if one of those gets blocked, they're all interconnected.

Yes.

And I had this really interesting conversation yesterday with Dr.

Kevin Tracy, and we were talking about the vagus nerve and how it influences so many of these different things because it has 100,000 synapses.

But I believe if these things are blocked, like in my case, I had a lot of trauma in my life.

And

being in the military, being having a very high security clearance, I was always told,

don't seek treatment for it, bury it, don't talk about it.

And I really feel because I buried it.

If you go through CPT, cognitive behavior therapy, cognitive process therapy, there's this topic of stuck points.

I really think I had these stuck points that were holding me back so much that it was impacting other areas of my life.

It was not allowing me to absorb some of the behavior changes that I was trying to do.

And when I cleared that out, it's kind of like the rest of me started to absorb all the inputs finally.

That reminds me of a saying that I heard.

I don't know if it was in treating trauma or addiction, but it really resonated with me.

And that's, you're only as sick as your secrets.

And that, of course, we were talking about it in a mental health context, but it actually really resonated for me physically as well.

Because I think, like you're saying, when those, when the, when one system is off, be it biological, neurological, whatever,

it's all interconnected.

And so you can't just be strengthening your body and destroying your mind.

Like the one will affect whatever's being destroyed is going to also start to prey on the thing that you're trying to strengthen.

That's been my experience for sure.

I want to go back to your book, Validate.

You write that none of us actively choose to berate or invalidate ourselves.

These are learned behaviors, internalized messages.

When I read that, it really hit me because it makes me think about how so many people, probably many of the listeners, carry around these voices from their past without even realizing that they're not their own.

When you look back on your own life through your own battles, Where did you first start to notice those internalized messages showing up?

And what did it take for you to start replacing them with something that was more kind and truthful?

I think the real genesis of things for me was I started becoming depressed in high school.

And to me, it was like, whoa, what's happening?

So I was like talking to my friends about it, talking a little bit to family.

And the reaction I got was like, that's weird.

You're crazy.

You're needy.

You're over,

like all of these judgments.

And

I hated myself for feeling this way because it made me desperate and it felt like it became a source of rejection.

And so I learned to hide and bury that so deep in order to survive.

It really, it felt like I was struggling to survive.

And part of what I learned was to hide that part of myself and to berate it and to hate it.

and see it as a source of rejection.

This is why people won't love me if they only knew they would reject me.

And honestly, it wasn't until I became a therapist and I had done therapy, I'd all the sorts of, I'd done all the things, but it wasn't until I was working with others and helping them identify how that invalidation from others was really dictating how they see themselves and how they relate in the world.

That was like, wait a minute, I'm telling people all day long that their suffering is valid and that they need to challenge these scripts they've developed and i can't do that i'm not doing that for myself like that there's a disconnect but it really i could not have gotten there if i was just focused on myself it had to be through my observations and work with others

okay and i have a follow-up to that sure you go on to connect pervasive invalidation not only to personal self-loathing, but to higher rates of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and even unfortunately, suicidal ideation.

And then you go on to even frame today's mental health crisis in part as a validation crisis, which really spoke to me because

I do a lot of research on mattering.

And to me, when I think of unmattering or Gordon Fleck describes it as anti-mattering, it really is a validation crisis when we don't feel like we matter.

That's right.

So if that's true, what does that really mean for how we approach healing?

And how can someone begin to dismantle years like you had, maybe decades of self-invalidation that they really never consciously chose in the first place?

Boy, there's a couple of different directions I could go with that.

One, and I think I will just say this point, because some of the feedback and pushback I've gotten from folks since the book came out, mostly folks who haven't really read the book, but just see some of the buzzwords, is that like, we're not supposed to rely on external validation, right?

So you shouldn't be seeking that from other people.

And let me tell you, that could not be further from the truth, right?

So to be clear, by validation, we mean communication that one is seen, understood, and accepted for who they are.

Okay.

Mark Leary, who's a great social psychologist, said, and I think I'm going to butcher this quote, but it was something to the effect of human beings differ from animals not so much in our need to survive or thrive, but in our need for connection.

We as humans distinctly need to feel accepted and belonging, a sense of acceptance and belonging.

And when we don't, we suffer.

We suffer tremendously.

So it's not that like the ability to validate yourself is somehow separate from needing validation from others.

On the contrary, we learn how to validate ourselves through validation from others.

Now, that said, as your question states, what do you do if that validation was lacking?

Or worse yet, what if instead of validation you were constantly invalidated, told that you don't matter, that your experiences are embarrassing, shameful, something to be hidden?

Okay, that's invalidation.

How do you heal there?

One would be to establish relationships in which you're getting more of that genuine validation.

Okay.

Another is to develop a self-validation practice, which I go through in detail in my book.

And so you use the exact same skills that you would use to validate others, you use on yourself, but you've got to make it a daily practice because those things, those hateful things you're telling yourself, they're not only a daily practice, they're sometimes an hourly, minutely practice.

And you've got to counteract those signals.

And so it takes intention.

And again, somewhat of a formal practice of kind of walking through that yeah

i'm just smiling because for whatever reason i recently re-watched the martian and i'm just thinking of poor mark watney mark damon's characters finding himself completely alone on this planet and having no one at all to validate him at all

That's right.

That's right.

Well, at least in that situation.

So now you're in like hermitage mode.

But there's an interesting thing there in that we have monks and folks who go off in isolation.

But generally speaking, the absence of attention from others is incredibly painful and incredibly punishing.

If in this country, to torture people, we put them in isolation, right?

We deprive them of interactions with others.

And it has profound effects on the mind and our emotions.

Yeah.

I've been to take this.

I didn't mean to go down this path, but we're here.

So we might.

So I've recently been reading Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, and in it, speaking of Mars, he's talking about the biosphere in it, and that the biosphere was created in many ways because if we're going to do space exploration, we need to figure out how to live in a closed environment.

And I have many friends who are astronauts, and many of them, before they go up to space, there's a facility down off the keys that's that where they become aquanauts and they live under the water for a few weeks.

And it's the closest thing that it could be to being on the space station, which is why some mariners are great candidates for the space program.

But it really got me thinking because the biosphere has not worked yet.

And it's not worked for a couple of reasons.

One, they can't seem to grow the plant life that they need to to survive including trees because one of the things they found is that trees need wind in order to grow but the other thing is that the interpersonal conflicts become so so deep that doesn't work either so what do you think that teaches us

so you're saying the interpersonal conflicts like how many people are at a station there i think it's eight to ten

Okay,

that's fascinating.

But if you're an eight to ten people and all of a sudden you become cast to the side and people aren't validating you or working with you, that can become horrible.

It can become lord of the flies real quick.

These other kind of social

ways that we tend to lean in social groups that are not healthy, right, where we start to form power structures, which are very often based on invalidation and then validation of the powerful, right?

That can quickly take shape.

I'm thinking of all the social psychology studies that show we are not always our best in a group setting.

We are prone to groupthink.

We are prone to allowing behaviors that we would otherwise condemn if the group is also allowing them.

So that said,

I think that is also a recipe for a very healthy dynamic if it's approached intentionally.

Emphasis on the intentionally.

So what would it look like to ensure that these folks feel more like a family than an army that's turning in on itself?

And I do think there's a pathway to that.

Absolutely.

You talked about your depression in high school.

I'm going to go back to an early story of mine.

When I was somewhere between five and six years old, I was playing tag

in the, between two houses.

And it's interesting because they've now created rules in today's society about tag, about how hard you can push people, how many fingers.

I might have been the reason for this because my neighbor, I was running away from him.

He pushed me really hard from behind.

I went flying in the air, crashed through our basement window, and it ended up causing a traumatic brain injury.

I woke up in the ER, having passed out with tubes in my head.

And from there, it got worse.

I developed a speech impediment.

I developed a lazy eye.

For the next three and a half, four years, I had to wear a patch.

I had cognitive difficulties, developed processing issues, a whole bunch of things.

But it truly caused me

not to want to interface with anyone because I was no longer functioning normally and kids would make fun of me.

When I would speak in class, I would lose my thoughts.

I would say the wrong things.

I couldn't concentrate.

So I would just sit there in class.

I remember, here I am, this strange kid wearing a patch on my head.

And I would just be like, please don't call on me.

Please don't call on me.

Please don't call on me.

And I remember in the midst of this, I started to go see this speech pathologist.

And I remember I'd have to walk through this field.

And at first, I hated it because it was just another thing where instead of being in English class, I was at the speech pathologist.

Over time, I don't know what my life would be like now without her because

not only was she helping me with my speech, but I think she saw that I'd become invisible in my own life.

And she started to help me feel seen and feel cared about.

And she helped me in far more ways than just my speech, which allowed me to find the courage to overcome all that.

But I tell that because if someone, if you think about that scenario and I didn't have that validation,

Where do you think I might be today?

It strikes me that she recognized that you had become invisible.

And I wonder if you hadn't also, like myself, in different circumstances, not nearly as painful in some ways, if you had made yourself invisible,

because it had become so punishing to be observed, to have any attention on you.

And I think you probably had.

You'd shrunken yourself so that the teacher wouldn't point call on you or what have you.

And so I imagine you would have continued to do that.

You would have continued to isolate, right?

And you would have continued to withdraw from relationships and other people because you wouldn't have a sense that it was safe.

And you wouldn't believe, how could you possibly believe that there would be the capacity for intimacy or being seen?

How would you even think you deserved it if you had never experienced it, if you'd only experienced the opposite?

So I think it could be quite, and I say this, I am an expert in treating self-harm and in suicidality.

And these are conditions that are often born out of a pervasive history of invalidation well i think that is what we see i bring it up because mine was a pretty extreme ace of this but if you look at what's happening especially to so many

gen z and now gen alpha kids A lot of them are growing up like on this because they're spending so much of their time on screens and they're not getting the validation that they once received.

And they're getting it artificially now or chasing it in ways that are so different than

we biologically, ecologically were brought up to be as hunter-gatherers.

And so I think what I experience now, you've got millions of kids, hundreds of millions who are experiencing this firsthand.

Do you think that's true?

100%.

It also

hints at a very important but nuanced point that I think is lost on a lot of folks, but it's just so important that I want to make it crystal clear.

What kids and anybody else for that matter is typically getting through social media and gaming and all of the kind of online platforms is at best praise.

Praise is a judgment.

It says, I like the way you look or I like the way you perform.

It's a positive judgment, but it is a judgment nonetheless.

Okay.

That is fundamentally different from validation.

Validation says, I accept you independent of how you look or perform.

And praise isn't inherently bad, but if it's the only input you're receiving from others, you get reinforced for filtering yourself.

be it through pictures or whatever, for creating a life that's greater than the one you have, because you want to exceed expectations to get praise.

Praise usually is earned through exceeding expectations.

That is a problem

because nowhere is there just genuine acceptance.

There's just not a space for it.

Online and social media platforms reinforce you for filtering yourself and selling products.

And that is fundamentally at odds with validation and acceptance.

In your book, you draw a clear line between validation and love.

For those

who

conflate the two, how do you look at or define the difference?

In a lot of ways, I don't think you can have love without validation.

And again, this is something people get, wait, what are you talking about?

You shouldn't need extra.

Here's what I mean.

If someone, if your partner, if your parents, if whomever, if they don't fundamentally accept you.

for who you are.

And perhaps because you haven't shown up honestly, perhaps because you have been hiding yourself as I know I did.

There was a whole part of my life that I just kept secret and intentionally, like you did, I made invisible to other people this depression, this dark stuff.

And so people loved me, but they loved a very well-crafted facade.

And that felt honestly somewhat hollow.

My experience, my concern was that if they knew the real me, they would reject me.

Now, if instead I felt deeply accepted for who I was, warts and all, although I don't want to call depression a wart, it is a disease.

But if they accepted me, my God,

how much deeper that love would have felt, right?

That's what would have been healing, is if I felt like these parts that I disdained were lovable.

That's the connection I see.

If that makes sense, I'm not sure if it does.

It does.

So

for someone who

is struggling right now with how do you communicate validation, you lay out eight skills for doing this.

And I was hoping maybe you could touch on these, but maybe go into one that tends to be the hardest for people to master and why.

Interestingly, even though a lot of what we're talking about is the self, right?

Like how your experience after your traumatic brain injury, my experience with depression, a big turning point for me in my life was when I started focusing on helping to reduce other people's suffering.

And I made this very clear decision in my head.

I just decided that nobody was going to understand my depressive darkness stuff, but I could use it to understand others and maybe give them some of what I had been seeking.

I wanted to be the type of therapist I had always wanted to have.

And so that is what I trained.

I became a psychologist.

And in the process, I learned these skills for communicating validation.

How do I validate somebody else?

How do I communicate acceptance?

And the research on the effectiveness of that is profound.

But I would say that it was in learning to validate others that I learned to validate myself.

So that's just a preamble to what all this is about.

But yes, we talk about eight skills that you can use to basically validate anybody.

And it would probably help to mention here that psychologists, of course, have very specific definitions for things.

And when we talk about validation, we're talking about communication.

It's a form of communication that one is mindful, understands, and empathizes with some part of another person's experience, thus accepting it as valid.

So it has those three qualities.

There's this kind of non-judgmental awareness, that's the mindfulness.

There's a sense of logical understanding.

that's the understanding and then there's this emotional understanding or empathy so if i'm going to validate somebody i need to ideally communicate all of that, but at the very least, I need to signal just one of those qualities, perhaps just mindfulness.

If I'm sitting across from somebody and I don't understand or empathize with them, the least I can do is be mindfully aware.

And it sends a subtle signal of validation.

I'll just pause there because that was a lot of information.

I'm glad you brought those three up because I want to go to a real life scenario from your book where this kind of came up.

You write, I have multiple sclerosis, I said with tears in my eyes.

Marsha Linehan stared at me blankly.

So what?

She asked.

This reader, you write, was not the response I was expecting from the person who had revolutionized modern psychology with her insights on validation.

What were you feeling at that?

You were in the midst of time.

You write Duke completing a doctorate program.

I was actually in Washington at that point.

I had moved for my postdoc.

So I was in Washington.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I had just been diagnosed with MS.

That's right.

So

where did that conversation lead?

Because at the onset of it, you thought it was going to be a stopping point for you.

And it turns out, I think that it turned out to become a launching point for you.

It really did.

So Marsha Linehan is the creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT.

And she's the one who developed these validation skills that we, that therapists train in.

And so I'd gone to her and I really wanted to be this great DBT therapist.

And I got sick with MS.

I was struggling with just intense vertigo, nausea, fatigue, pain, all of it, all of it.

And I went to her and said, I don't think I can do that.

I'm going to have to basically retire.

I did all this training to be a DBT therapist and I can't do it.

And her response was like, no, that's bull crap.

She did not see my logic there as valid.

She was basically saying, no, like, I don't see any validity in what you're saying.

Okay.

Which actually, there's an important point there, which is that with validation, you never validate something that you don't actually consider to be valid.

It's not about just pumping people up and making them feel good.

Okay.

She didn't see the validity in that statement.

And in the moment, I'll be honest, that felt a bit judgmental the way she delivered it.

What she did instead was to challenge my interpretation.

And she said, no, you need to be a DBT therapist because you have MS.

Like you

suffer deeply.

Other people suffer deeply.

This is a treatment for people who suffer deeply.

We need all of this to connect.

So whatever you're experiencing, you need to use that.

to help you understand and connect better.

And yes, you're going to have to make some adjustments.

It's not going to look like how it looks for every other therapist.

You're not going to be on call 24-7 or you might have smaller practice or whatever.

But you can, you need to use this was her point.

So she was invalidating my assessment of the situation while simultaneously validating my capabilities.

Only she could pull that off.

I couldn't pull that off.

I have a friend, Rory Vaden, who has this saying,

you're best positioned to serve the person that you once were.

Oh, I love that.

So I think

that is, that captures what you were just saying and what she was trying to tell you.

That's exactly right.

And that right there, it's such a key.

I want, I don't know, if I could just have everybody feel that in their bones, because your suffering then, it's not about you.

It's about what it can do for other people.

That moment with her was a turning point for me.

I had that realization then.

And it served me when I was then diagnosed with cancer.

It served me when I was experiencing different struggles in my life.

I stopped from that point forward.

My struggle was never just about me.

It was like, how do I use this?

And that has been the single greatest gift to my life

without a doubt.

So I want to go back to your depression because

I too myself have experienced severe depression and I've I've experienced low-grade depression too.

And it's interesting

how it can creep up on you over time without you even noticing it's there.

For me, it just started in the background.

And I think I barely even, I could tell my world was getting a bit dimmer, but I couldn't figure out why until...

It went from low grade to mid-grade.

And then it does this hockey stick once you reach that point and it became severe.

But I remember early on in my career, I would hear people say that person's out of work because they have depression.

And I used to think, What do you mean they can't work because they're depressed?

What do you think are some of the misconceptions that people face?

For folks who are depressed, we've come such a long way regarding how we approach and think about mental health.

But for the most part, so many people, including, I'll be honest,

treatment providers, look at conditions like depression or anxiety as character flaws, right?

They reflect a weakness

and

nothing could be further from the truth.

Weirdly, this is going to sound so weird to say, but it is true.

One of the weirdly refreshing things about having cancer was that people immediately understood,

right?

I'd lost my hair and all this stuff.

So I couldn't.

I'd have to cancel a session or I'd have to, everybody understood.

There was all sorts of support and understanding.

And I'm thinking like, wow,

this feels, because with that mess and depression, that stuff is very hard to see in a lot of ways.

It's not obvious and people don't really understand it in the same way they do

cancer.

And the judgment was gone, right?

And so all of a sudden, people reacted to me as though I had a disease.

Whereas the fatigue and some of the other symptoms, they felt very similar to what I experienced when I was depressed.

They were just as debilitating.

They just had a different cause.

And therefore, all of a sudden, they were valid

to other people.

At least that's how it felt.

Whereas before, it was like, what's wrong?

Oh, she's depressed.

I want to switch gears to your cancer battle.

When we were talking before we came on air, I told you, for me, this is really personal.

My sister, you're Caroline.

My sister, who I used to lovingly call Caroline until one time when she was about 34 or 35, told me she hated being called Caroline.

And please call her Carolyn.

Because that was her name.

But Carolyn was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

And yet in the midst of it,

she

had always had this feeling that her life professionally hadn't accumulated into what she felt she was called to do.

And so she decided in the midst of this to go back and get another master's degree in social work.

because she felt that through her struggles, she would be able to serve others.

And she told told me that those few years where she got to do that, she was able to help so many lives and it made her feel like she was healing herself or at least finding a purpose for her life during that time.

And I want to relate this because you write that even during your own cancer battle, you found ways to help others.

How did you find that serving became part of your own healing process?

I love the question.

I'm truly inspired by what you describe in your sister.

It is what I aspire

to do with my experience.

I love that she saw it as a reason to go back and get her master's, not an obstacle to doing so.

Sorry, can you repeat your question?

Well, I was amazed.

with everything she was going through, the chemo, the recovering from Whipple surgery, going through Whipple surgery, the radiation,

that she was able to do it.

And she did it in two years flat, maybe even faster than that, probably because she realized she didn't have a lot of time.

But what I wanted to ask is, similar to her, as you were going through your own cancer journey, you found ways to help others.

And how did serving become part of your healing process?

I vividly remember once it became clear, I'd had a surgery and they realized that the cancer was more advanced than they'd realized.

And my oncologist says, well, you're not going to be able to work, which one is a very privileged thing to say because I actually felt like I very much had to work for financial reasons and

for emotional and spiritual reasons.

Like her saying, you're not going to be able to continue your work.

All I saw ahead of me was black, if that was the case.

Like I could not imagine how I was going to go through this experience if I wasn't working with other people and helping them and more focused on their stuff than mine.

So I did in fact choose to continue working, albeit in a

much more limited capacity.

But I also just immediately would try and find to reduce suffering.

And it doesn't have to be as huge as being a DBT therapist who works with suicidal people.

The day that they told me I needed to get chemo.

I said to my husband, we are going to find, there was a kill shelter up the street, or not up the street, about 20 minutes away.

And we went there and got two kittens who are on death row there.

And we took them home to foster them.

And I wanted to get them healthy.

And that was just like, let me focus on this.

And of course, being us, we ended up keeping the kittens.

But every day, like, I see that they are alive and they are thriving.

And they would have no doubt died.

And I know it's a small thing and it's an animal, it's an X, Y, or Z, but

I love that my cancer enabled that.

And adorably, my daughter has repeatedly talked about how one of those cats, Grindel, her dear Gigi,

was a real source of support for her when I wasn't there.

And in fact, I didn't realize the extent to which she felt that I wasn't there until she talked about cuddling with Grindel.

in her bed and we were teasing her about her bizarre obsession with this cat and she revealed that she really sought comfort in this animal and and felt like the animal had really been there for her.

And so that's just, I guess that's what I see in terms of this relationship between suffering and connection and suffering and connection.

It's just, it's there if you make it.

Yeah.

And since you brought her up, I know one of the most difficult aspects of my sister's journey was my nephew Miles was 11 or 12,

might have been 10 when she was diagnosed.

And I know for her life milestones were, I want to see him get to

graduate from eighth grade, which she missed by a few weeks.

But she was really wanting to see him graduate from high school was her big goal.

For someone who's listening, who,

whether it's a cancer diagnosis or another diagnosis you get, how do you explain this to your child?

Because I know for Miles, it was hard for him to comprehend because at first your parent looks like they're healthy and they don't understand the gravity of the situation.

The other obstacle there is that you go from looking very healthy to in a very short period of time, especially if you're going through chemotherapy or something, looking very sick.

And that is rattling for anybody, much less a child.

It's this combination, and we didn't do it perfectly in every sense of the way, far from it.

But it's this balance of honesty and

protection.

And it's like trying to know what are you honest about and what do you protect them from?

And we didn't always get that balance right.

But I think the tendency is to inform kids less about what's going on.

And the consequence of that can be that they feel like, oh my God, you end up in the hospital and they didn't realize that was an option.

Like, what, whoa, whoa, you could go to the hospital, like you're there for a week.

as I was at one point, almost two weeks.

It's like, wait a minute, this was not what you guys described.

And so I think you've got to be transparent and obviously careful about what you disclose.

But it's that honesty piece that I think people tend to err on the side of caution.

And that is a mistake in some ways.

Thank you for sharing that.

And I just want to go back to the service aspect.

And what I wanted to ask you is:

if someone is in the midst of deep suffering, of any type, how can they begin to emerge from that suffering by using small acts of service

to be small acts of self-restoration?

Oh my God, I love that, Smog.

There's some really fascinating studies on retirement homes and plants.

And so they looked at, I don't know if you've heard this, they looked at giving folks in retirement homes who had similar levels of functioning and

health separated into groups as we do when we're running experiments and they gave one group some plants to take care of.

And the other group, they got no plants.

What they found was that the group that received the plants significantly improved on all indices, all measures of activities of daily living, ability to thrive.

And I think, I can't recall, thanks to all the stuff I've had done, I can't quite recall the exact finding, but I'm pretty sure life expecting, I'm sure, I'm pretty sure they lived significantly longer.

And we're talking about just having a house plant to water.

And so I do think, and I know what it's like to be like on your back depressed, but if you can just, I'm not kidding, like just get a plant.

Just when you go out and it's so painful, I want you to stop focusing on yourself and instead just try and make one person smile.

Maybe it's because you smile at them.

But you need the focus to be off of you because what you're experiencing is too painful.

Put it on someone else and just let that be where your attention rests.

If you learn to control your attention in that way, you will suffer significantly

less in some ways because that suffering will have had meaning.

I don't know.

That all sounds very hokey as I say it out loud, but it's my anthem at the same time.

I think there's another aspect of it.

I'm sure you're familiar with your work with Daker Kautner's work on compassion and awe.

And I always bring him up because he has this concept that he's termed moral beauty.

And moral beauty, he has found in his research is when we find awe

more often than any other way.

And the most,

I guess, the easiest way to experience it is when you witness someone else do an act of service to someone else and you feel the awe coming off of it or you yourself perform that act of service.

So to me, which also goes into his research, if you're creating more awe by doing these acts of service, it also triggers the vagus nerve, which could also lead to more compassion and emotional healing if you play this full circle.

So it really is interesting where, when you look at this, where it could go.

It is.

And I know this sounds very basic.

And it's, okay, you're going to cure depression by smiling at people in the street.

No.

And yes, if it is what gets you out of your bed and you are doing this consistently, and it is reinforcing, that's what we call behavioral activation.

It's an evidence-based treatment for depression, which is to go out and engage in the world in ways that you are no longer doing because you're depressed.

So

this isn't just fluff.

This is survival, in my opinion.

The problem is we get very all or nothing when things are dark.

And so it's, oh, I haven't even called my mom back, or I haven't gone to my kids' recital.

I can't do anything.

And in like, instead, in those moments, we need to actually focus on the smallest piece that we could bite off.

Like, what's just one thing I could do right now, but it has to be for somebody else.

I don't care if it's just leaving a positive Yelp review.

Okay.

It's just take the focus off of you and your pain, because otherwise that pain is going to run the show.

It is going to eat you up.

So you need to stop feeding it with attention.

That's what it feeds off of.

I think.

I know.

So I want to go to the topic of pending,

which is not a topic I usually ever talk about.

But I had this great conversation with Allison Wood Brooks, and she came out with this book earlier this year, which was all about communication.

I would love to be able to teach a class on how you teach gooder in life, which she does.

But we were having this conversation that we're losing the art of conversation.

Oh, yeah, totally.

But she was saying.

that when we're in a conversation with someone, it's really like holding up a mirror for ourselves.

And that metaphor really stuck with me because you see yourself in that person and you can experience their life through your own experiences by viewing yourself in them.

And as you write in the book, when you're looking at that mirror, if you're changing your natural speech patterns in response to someone, it shows that they've affected you.

It means that they have your attention.

But I think so many of us are so distracted by the pinball life that we live in that we're not doing that.

I know I'm as guilty as anyone else about that.

So what happens when we're not attending?

We're not listening.

We're basically just having a conversation with ourselves.

And it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Whatever narrative we have in our head about how much this person sucks or how stupid they are, we're just reinforcing it.

by all of the counter arguments we're focused on and pointing out everything that's wrong.

In reality, we're missing what's valid in their experience.

We're preventing ourselves from connecting with them because we don't like some part of what they're experiencing or what they're describing.

It is very, again, it has that kind of like egotistical quality to it that suffering can force upon us, where we're just very focused on me.

When you flip that on its head, when it's not about how you sound or the argument you make or whether or not you convince them, if it's just to understand

them,

to make them feel heard, it becomes a very different

and I'd argue more effective communication, even if your ultimate aim is to influence somebody.

Helping them feel heard first

will improve your ability to influence or affect how they think about the situation.

That is a fact.

Not one we talk about often, but definitely a fact.

For someone who's brand new to this whole concept, what's the simplest thing,

given what we just talked about, that they can do in their next conversation to practice validation?

So the simplest thing, especially if you don't agree or you don't understand where someone's coming from, I want you to just play this game in your head.

Okay.

It's a two-parter.

You want to try and figure out what's this person's point and why does it matter, right?

What is it they're trying to say?

And then in your head, I want you to think of a better way.

to make that point or articulate it.

If you watch great talk show hosts, the Larry Kings and the Oprah's over the years, you'll see that they're doing this in some capacity.

They are trying to bring out the very best interview they can in the other person.

All right.

And they do so by asking certain questions and they'll re

state what the other person had said, perhaps a little bit more concisely, and then they'll add to it, right?

They're just trying to pull out the best interview, and it's reflected in the questions that they ask.

They don't necessarily agree with the other person, but they are trying to both understand their point and help them crystallize it.

And that is fundamentally different from how most of us engage in conversations, where we're looking to add.

I was speaking with Kelly Leonard, a great improv, the creative director at Second City in Chicago.

And they were talking about yes and.

I'm going to interview

her here in a month.

So I can.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

So they do this, this practice of yes and,

right?

So how do you build off of what someone has said?

Get them talking more, help them bring it out.

That's what we're trying to do with validation.

It's not about you or making your point.

It's about helping the other person understand and feel understood.

So that begs the question,

whether you're a leader in the workplace, or you're a parent trying to validate your kids.

How do you use validation to build trust without it feeling like you're manipulating the other person?

You have to come at it authentically.

Okay.

So if I am just trying to get what I want, that will come across.

It's what we feel from politicians.

They're saying all the right things, right?

But there's this sense that

they're working me.

And so in those moments, again, the talk show host is really just trying.

Their intention is just to get the best answer, the best communication, the best interview they can get out of this other person.

And that's what shows through.

So it does all come down to what is your intention here?

And it has to just be to communicate mindfulness, understanding, and empathy.

If it's going to work,

if it's going to actually increase psychological safety and build trust.

I have this story that just came up in my mind.

I was a senior, we called him firstie at the Naval Academy at the time, and I had a pretty prominent position.

And for whatever reason, I was asked to be one of the people who gave President Clinton a tour of campus.

And I remember I was having this pretty deep conversation with President Clinton, and he was responding to me, but I will never forget.

that the entire time he was talking to me, he never looked at me.

He was like looking through me almost as if he was looking a football field away in the distance.

It always affected me because I was in his presence, but I didn't feel like I was in his presence,

so to speak.

And although he was dialoguing with me, I didn't feel like I was being validated by him in any way.

I just felt like he was going through the motions.

And I think we do the same thing that he did so often without even knowing it.

That's right.

That's right.

We are so focused on our goal.

And you got to just flip that on its head.

It's this Zen cone, right?

A Zen cone is like a riddle where you have to try and figure out how both of these things can simultaneously be true or what have you.

And it's this situation where the more you try, the more focused you are on your agenda, the less likely you are to achieve it.

The more you focus on having the other person feel seen and heard, the more likely you are actually to receive that in return.

But you have to drop all pretense.

You can't

come at it through fake,

inauthentic communication it just doesn't work and if it does it's a very skilled sociopath and they're few and far between fortunately well i want to give the counterexample so i was fortunate enough to get to meet colin powell and i met him in the weirdest of circumstances i had spoken at a salesforce event called dreamforce and the ceo of salesforce mark benioff a buddy of mine is close friends with neil young so neil young was performing to a smaller group There might have been three or 400 of us there and Colin Powell, who was on Mark's board, happened to be there.

I'd never met him before, but we're in the midst of this getting prepared for

go to this concert.

And obviously, because he's there, there's a lot of attention, but he found out that I was a veteran.

And

as compared to President Clinton, it was as if the world stopped.

And I was the only thing that mattered at that moment to Colin Powell.

And he made me feel really unique and thankful for that I had served like he had and other things.

And, but the difference in how I walked away from that and how I felt validated as a human and made to feel like I mattered was pretty profound.

So I just give those examples because I think it really sums up the discussion we've been having today.

It reminds me also just real quick of this story of the Dalai Lama.

I think they told this in the art of happiness before he was like on the map as this huge religious figure.

He was in the United States or something.

He's staying at a a hotel and they would describe people like first couple days they're there, people, he stops and talks to everybody, and everybody in the hotel knows him.

And then by the third day, there's just a line of people waiting to talk to this man, right?

No one knows who he, like, really understands who he is.

He didn't have the same cultural significance he has now, but he had this effect on people wherein they were drawn towards him.

And I have to imagine that a lot of what was getting communicated in those moments was validation and acceptance.

It's interesting because when I worked for Lowe's, I was senior executive at Lowe's, we had this gentleman named Larry Stone who started as a mail clerk and then

worked the cash register and ended up progressing, never went to college.

all the way to becoming the president and chief operating officer of Lowe's.

And we would have this national sales meeting where you'd have all the executives there, including the CEO.

How many of the employees do you think wanted to meet with the CEO?

Very, it turns out very few.

Larry, it was as if he was a rock star.

He had hundreds of people following him around.

And the reason being,

I think, was Larry knew their stores better than they did, but he didn't.

This guy was like a walking encyclopedia.

I would go on a store tour with him.

And in the first two or three minutes, he could tell you everything about a store.

But he knew the metrics on the stores better than the store managers did, but he never approached it like I'm a know-it-all.

He always used it as coaching moments to make them better humans.

And I think people really respected that for them because he didn't criticize.

He helped.

And he was almost like that grandfather we all wish we had who was this just sage person that helped us improve as a human.

It's just, to me, that's what validation does.

Totally.

It reminds me again of something I learned in grad school or was taught, which is that I might be the expert of depression or anxiety in that I know what causes it.

I understand how to treat it.

X, Y, is the X, Y, Z.

But the client, the patient, is the expert of their experience.

And you must show deference and respect to that similarly the ceo with this encyclopedic memory might be the expert of his domain and really understand these stories but he is also

respecting the expertise of the other person's experience trying to understand that meet them where they're at and see if this other expertise he has could strengthen what they bring and really embrace that.

Yeah.

Yeah, to me, it's really the great example of a good leader versus a great great leader.

Absolutely.

And again, that in like you were saying with Colin Powell, right?

He's talking to you, like, no offense, but you're not going to have a huge effect on Colin Powell's.

He doesn't need to get anything out of you.

And yet he's still bringing that humility and respect.

And if you're just out it to get stuff from other people, you're going to come at it.

It's going to feel like the Bill Clintons, right?

They only really engage, if they ever engage, with folks that they can get something from.

Caroline, when people finish validation, what do you hope that they not only understand,

but they actually feel?

On some level, this is going to sound weird, but I hope they feel validated.

Genuinely, I hope they see that

some of the hurt that they were experiencing, that they have experienced, has come out of feeling not seen.

And

that

there are people who understand that and hopefully they can now understand that.

I've had a lot of people reach out and say just that to me, that in reading this, they found themselves feeling deeply validated and that it made it easier for them to understand how to speak this language, so to speak.

That is what I would want for folks to come at it both inspired to use these skills, but also to feel a sense of validation as well.

And if a listener wants to learn more about you, obviously we'll have the book in the show notes and everything else.

Where are the best places for them to go?

I am on Instagram, TikTok, Dr.

Caroline Fleck.

Go to my website, drcarolinefleck.com, where I have awesome behind the scenes footage of some of the conversations and stories that are in the book with videos and photos and whatnot.

Well, Caroline, thank you so much for being here.

It was such an honor to have you on Passion Struck.

This was such a blast, John.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

That's a wrap on today's conversation with Dr.

Caroline Fleck.

What I loved about this discussion is how Caroline talks about validation and the very emotions we're most likely to fight against.

Anxiety, perfectionism, even burnout, they're not signs of weakness.

They're signals.

And when we learn to listen with curiosity instead of judgment, they can become tools for resilience, clarity, and growth.

So as you reflect on this episode, ask yourself, what if my anxiety isn't the enemy, but a messenger?

Where in my life am I still striving for perfection instead of embracing progress?

And what would it look like to build a relationship with my emotions rather than a battle against them?

If this conversation struck a chord with you, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating in review.

And if you know someone navigating anxiety, stress, or burnout, share this episode with them.

It might be the reframe they need right now.

For more insights like today's, join me on my sub stack at theignitedlife.net, where I share behind-the-scenes reflections, book insights, workbooks, and tools to help you live intentionally.

And don't forget to check out our new store at startmattering.com.

Coming up next on Passion Struck, I'm joined by Dr.

Ingrid Clayton to discuss her groundbreaking new book, Fawning.

We'll explore why the need to please so often makes us lose ourselves and how to find our way back.

It's a raw, important conversation about trauma, identity, and reclaiming your voice that you won't want to miss.

I feel like people have been stuck in a chronic fawn response and they don't know it.

They actually think they're being kind or empathic or generous and they don't understand the degree to which these characteristics that belong to them are essentially being hijacked for the sake of other

and the level of self-abandonment that this creates.

We think we're being kind, but we don't realize that by solely prioritizing everybody else, we're not being kind to ourselves.

And so highlighting this is incredibly important personally and professionally.

And then some.

If I don't have a sense of self, how can I fully show up in the world?

Until then, feel deeply, live intentionally, and as always, live life passion-struck.